The past few nights had been mercifully quiet, but she was still having trouble sleeping after dark. That was why she wanted to watch Two for the Road and take a nice, long nap.

She checked her tablet and saw it was time to dip a hand into the mason jar. After fishing a few pills out, she swallowed them down with a meager sip of water and settled into Mooshy, which contoured itself around her head. From her vantage point, looking out at the lake, she couldn’t see the sun, but its reflection on the water burned a horizontal line right to the back porch. There was nothing more she wanted in this world than to be out there with Andrew. Knowing her, she’d challenge him to a race, the stakes typically being something he’d been wanting to do in the bedroom. Before everything had gone to shit, she’d been strong and fast and highly competitive. Even a kayak race (she’d only been in a kayak twice in her life) would net her at least 50/50 odds of winning.

If sex was on the line, there really were no losers, except that time Andrew had whipped her in miniature golf and she had to let him film them doing it in the shower. They’d watched it once after that, Kate viewing the whole thing through the slits between her fingers. Andrew had loved it, his tent-poled shorts attesting to that, but she’d hated it. The angles were all wrong, the lighting less than flattering.

Is that really the face I make when I come? Oh, no, don’t spread my cheeks for all the world to see. We look like we’re in pain.

She’d made him delete the video, and she never wagered on miniature golf again.

And here she was reminiscing about things that would never be, missing her life with her husband even though they were still together, more so now than ever.

Kate watched Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney snipe at one another in an airport diner, her eyelids getting heavy.

When the back door slid open, she practically levitated off the bed.

Andrew walked in, no longer wearing the bathing suit and his black Ramones T-shirt he’d had on when he left to go kayaking.

“Whoa, it’s only me,” he said.

Kate’s heart pulsed against the back of her tongue.

“I think I nodded off for a second. You scared me.”

“If by ‘a second’, you mean three hours, yeah, you definitely nodded off.”

He had a beer in one hand, the paper in the other. He tossed the paper by the growing pile in front of the fireplace. They hadn’t lit a fire yet because Kate was paranoid about burning the house down. But when they finally did, they’d have enough fuel in newspapers and magazines alone to keep it going for a week.